The candidate, Dr. Susan E. Erdman, has completed a 3 year NIH training fellowship in Comparative Medicine and has one additional year of research experience in immunology and viral oncology. She will take the Laboratory Animal Medicine boards in July 1993. Dr. Erdman has been studying lymphoma and paraneoplastic syndromes for four years. Her special interest is viral oncology. This award will give her the training to establish an independent research program to study cancer biology of animals and humans. The research proposal is to develop the ferret as an animal model for cancer and immunosuppressive disease. Our research will focus on isolation of an etiologic agent from ferrets with malignant lymphoma. The agent will be characterized morphologically and in terms of growth characteristics, proteins, and genetics. Serological and molecular methods will confirm association with malignancy. Studies to date have demonstrated numerous parallels between human and other mammalian viral infections, thus providing valuable animal models for studies in human disease. Characterization of this agent and its biology in the ferret will contribute significantly to our knowledge of virology and immunopathogenesis. The environment in which the training will take place is the MIT-Harvard Biomedical community. Four laboratories, the Divisions of Comparative Medicine and Toxicology at MIT, Department of Cancer Biology at the Harvard School of Public Health, and the Division of Immunology, Harvard Medical School, New England Regional Primate Research Center, will share resources and expertise in the training of this candidate. A joint sponsorship will be coordinated between Dr. James G. Fox, who is an expert in the development of animal models and the ferret in biomedical research, and Drs. Myron Essex and Phyllis Kanki are well known for their work on the virology and pathogenesis of retroviruses. This combination provides an exceptional opportunity for training in biomedical research.